BeTips.net

Once you’ve gotten a taste for BeOS, you probably won’t want to be using Windows very often. So why boot all the way into Windows just to boot BeOS? As it happens, the BeOS boot loader, which is present both on the BeOS boot floppy and in Be’s boot manager („bootman“), is capable of finding image.be (which is the raw disk image containing BeOS Personal Edition) no matter where it lives on your hard drive, even if it’s sitting somewhere in a Windows partition.
If you don’t want to Install Personal Edition to a real partition, you’ll need to boot BeOS from a boot floopy. If you do install to a real partition, open a Terminal window and type „bootman„. The wizard will lead you through the simple process of installing a new master boot record, capable of booting BeOS and many other operating systems.
Another way to do this, without using a floppy is to boot Windows and hit F8 as it starts booting. Boot quickly to a DOS prompt and type:

c:eosloadbeos.com

This will start the BeOS launcher, without requiring you to go through Windows first.
Geek note: The reason why the bootman technique can’t be used with the Personal Edition „virtual partition“ is because bootman needs the BIOS ID of all volumes. The BIOS, of course, can’t possibly know about the presence of the virtual partition, which is really just a file hanging out somewhere on your hard drive.

Windows 95/98 are single-processor operating systems. If you run them on a dual-proc machine, Windows will disable the second processor in hardware. Because BeOS Personal Edition usually gets launched from within Windows, it finds that 2nd (or 4th, or 8th) processor already shut down, thereby nullifying one of Be’s great advantages — the best symmetric multiprocessing in the industry.
The solution to this problem is the same as given in Common hardware problems in Personal Edition — just find a way to cold or warm boot your machine so that BeOS can initialize the hardware on its own. This can be done by booting Personal Edition from a boot floppy or by installing to a separate partition and booting with bootman.

Frustrated by the size of the 500MB partition size limitation in BeOS 5 Personal Edtion? There are several ways to overcome it and get PE onto a full size partition. The easiest way is probably to create a BeOS installation CD out of the raw image.be file. If you don’t have a CD burner, read on.
First of all, you’ll need a blank partition somewhere on your system. This could be an empty D: drive, for example, or blank space you’ve created with fdisk or PartitionMagic or Be’s own DriveSetup. Make sure this partition is at least 2*AmountOfRAM+200MBs.
Install PE normally, from within Windows. Then boot into BeOS and launch the Installer application. Installer has the amazing ability to install BeOS from any existing BeOS installation to any blank BFS partition. Use the Installer’s options to select the From: volume (your Personal Edition installation) and To: volume (your blank partition). Allow the Installer to initialize the volume with a block size of 1024 (remember, this will destroy all data on the partition!) and let ‚er rip. A few minutes later, you’ll have two complete BeOS installations.
Now you’ll want to give yourself a boot menu, so you can select an operating system at boot time rather than going through Windows. Installer should offer to install Bootman when installation is done — this is highly recommended for easiest booting. See also Modify bootman after the fact .
Once you’re sure everything is safely up and running, you can even uninstall PE from within Windows, and your full size partition will still run just fine.

Some people have encountered hardware-related problems with BeOS 5 Personal Edition, including invisible mouse pointers, strange error messages on startup, failure to work with supported devices, and even lockup on boot. Most of these problems stem from the fact that booting BeOS from within Windows leaves some hardware in an indefinite state, with hardware IRQs and memory registers thinking they’re still in Windows land.
When you boot BeOS from within Windows, you only get a software reboot, which leaves things in a pre-initialized state. Therefore, most of these problems can be fixed by doing a cold or warm boot, so BeOS can initialize the hardware on its own.
The solution is to either boot BeOS from a boot floppy or by installing BeOS to a real partition and then installing bootman. There are several techniques for installing Personal Edition to a real partition here on the Tip Server.
Allowing your hardware to be initialized from a real boot solves many problems with PE which are not technically Be’s fault.
Note: If you already have an R4.5.x installation, you may find that you get all kinds of weird error messages when booting. This is because the bootloader is trying to boot your old partition and getting confused. To solve this, just hit Spacebar as the boot icons start to appear, and select the „Personal Edition“ boot volume instead.
If you get weird boot errors, make sure you don’t have any antivirus software running — the virus checker may not know what to make of BeOS.

KB (KVBudhu@aol.com) adds:
To boot BeOS from floppy faster, press the Spacebar when the boot icons start to appear. Go to boot options, select boot volume, and select „Personal Edition.“ Navigate back to „Continue Booting“. This achieves the same non-Windows effect as booting all the way from floppy, but uses the bootloader on the hard disk, which is much faster than floppy access.

Be’s Travis Geiselbrecht (geist@be.com) adds:
If you try booting from the boot disk or from DOS, make sure there are no EMS memory managers running.
loadbeos.com has to load the zbeos bootloader, which has to load the kernel above any memory that is managed by any DOS memory managers. Sometimes, depending on the setup, this causes the kernel to be loaded too high, which has a definite limit. Anyhoo, booting off of the disk should solve the problem, like most other BeOS PE boot problems.

Sergei Dolgov (dolgov@ut.ee) adds this information:
Some people have the opposite problem from what’s described above, i.e. they can boot successfully from Windows, but not from floppy (sticks on „drive recognition“ icon when booting from floppy or DOS command prompt). This problem may be solved by disabling UDMA in the BIOS, even though the ALI chipset exists in Be’s hardware compatibility list.
Sergei tested this fix on an ALI5 chipset socket7 motherboard.

Update: Don’t want to bother burning a CD or downloading the BeOS installation image? Want a bunch of free and trial software at your fingertips? LeBuzz offers a complete Personal Edition CD ready-made for less than 10 bucks.
The free version of BeOS 5 creates a fixed partition size of 500MB. While you can always create more/larger partitions with DriveSetup once Personal Edition has been installed, what if you want to create larger partitions to begin with? As it happens, the raw disk image of BeOS installed by Personal Edition has a 2K cluster size — the same as is used for BeOS CDs. If you burn image.be (located in c:\beos on the Windows side, and also included in the BeOS4Linux istribution) to a CD-ROM with CDBurner or another burning app on another platform, you can use the disc it creates as a normal BeOS installation CD, making it possible to install Personal Edition just like you do the Pro Edition, to any size hard drive or partition.
Peter Hickman (peterhi@shake.demon.co.uk) notes that you can create a fully customized install CD with these techniques as well. Just boot into Personal Edition from Windows etc. and add any dev tools, applications, documents, backgrounds, sounds, and other customizations. All of your changes will be written into the image file, which later becomes the installation media. Therefore, all of your changes get carried over to fresh installations. BeTips has used this technique extensively and it works great. The only thing that doesn’t get carried over is your custom fileystem indices.
To do this with Be’s CDBurner, mount your Windows partition on the desktop, launch CDBurner, and pull down Disc | Add Data Track. Navigate to image.be and select it, then click Burn Now. Whether you use CDBurner or other burning software, make sure you’re burning a raw disk image, not a normal file.
If you don’t have access to a Windows machine, grab the BeOS4Linux.tar.gz archive on one of the mirrors instead — it contains the exact same image file.
Note that it is not possible to boot from this CD by telling your BIOS to boot from CD without following the instructions in the second part of this tip. Without doing that (and it’s only a little bit hairy), you will need to create a BeOS boot floppy to boot from this CD.
Once you’ve created your CD and have a BeOS boot floppy, insert both the floppy and the CD and restart your machine. When the BeOS boot icons appear, hit the Spacebar and use the boot options menu to make sure you’re booting from CD. Continue booting and installation will proceed normally. If you’ve already set aside a partition, select it as the target. If you need to create a partition first, click More Options and launch DriveSetup to create a partition first. Remember: DriveSetup is not a non-destructive partition manager!

Making the CD Bootable

Richard M. Shaw (hobbes at dnlp.net) contributes this on making the CD actually bootable:
You have to use mkhybrid to convert the floppy.img to an El Torrito boot image file… The command line syntax it pretty hairy, but here it is…
Put floppy.img in a directory by itself (unless you want any other files included in the new image (ISO only, not BeOS files.) This is wrapped here for readability, but put this all on one line.

mkhybrid -b floppy.img -c boot.catalog 
 -a -r -J -V BeOS_Boot -o boot.img directory_name

where:
-b tells which image is bootable
-c creates some boot catalog, don’t know what i does but I did notice it’s on the 4.5 CD
-a -r -J (includes all files (in ), rationailzed rock (Unix), Joliet, etc
-V Volume name for that track
-o the object image (i.e. what its going to write to)
– directory_name — Where floppy.img is located, along with any other files you want on that track
Now that you’ve got both boot.img and image.be, launch CDBurner and pull down Disc | Add Data Track and navigate to boot.img. Do the same for image.be. Click Burn Now. Your CD will be bootable.
For more information on creating bootable BeOS CDs, see this Be Developer’s Newsletter article.

Creating the CD from within Windows

James Freiwirth (james@plasmateksoftware.com) contributes the following, but he found it on usenet, where it originated with a person named Conor Daly.

1. Install BePE on your Windows drive (eg. C:eos). Boot into the BeOS PE installation.
2. Create the directory /boot/home/setup and maybe a few subdirectories below that.
3. Download any drivers you think you might need and any apps you want and store these in the Setup directory. These will get included on the CD and will be copied to your new installation.
4. Right-click on the ‚Personal Edition‘ volume icon on the desktop and select ‚Edit Name‘. Enter ‚BeOS-5 Installation CDROM‘ or something like that. This becomes the name you’ll see if you want to choose what to boot.
5. Reboot to Windows.
6. In Nero select CD Boot and select c:eosfloppy.img as your boot image. Burn that. Don’t try to include the BeOS image at this point or you’ll just end up with the file on the CD
7. In Nero select ‚File/Burn image‘ and select C:eosimage.be. Choose a block size of 2048 and burn that. Don’t worry about an error message when you load the image to burn.
8. In Nero, create a ‚New Multisession‘ CD and add the BeOS-5PersonalEdition.exe and maybe the Devtools.zip. Burn that.

Thats it, you’re set. Now you need to reboot, use a boot floppy, and install BeOS to its own partition.

Kevin Adams (machop80@swbell.net) contributes:
After using the Virtual Memory panel once, you’ll have a file /boot/home/ config/settings/kernel/drivers/virtual_memory. The first line of this file reads:

vm on

Change this to „vm off“, reboot, and you’ll be running without virtual memory.
The remainder of this tip covers the possibility of shrinking your swap file, but does not work as advertised.

Editor’s note: It has come to my attention that this tip does not work as advertised. Since it seems like it should work, I’ll leave it here for now in hopes that this will be fixed in a future release. But don’t expect this to work in BeOS 5, Personal or Pro.
BeOS uses a fixed algorithm to determine the size of your swap file, depending on the amount of memory in your machine. By necessity, the size of the swap file is equal to or larger than the amount of memory in your machine. This, however, can cause problems in some rare situations. For instance, what if you have 256MB of memory but only a 500MB boot partition, such as the one you get with BeOS 5 Personal Edition? You’re not going to have much room left over for data storage.
To use a smaller swap file, manipulate the slider in the Virtual Memory preferences panel at least once, and close the panel (no need to reboot just now). This will create a text settings file at /boot/home/config/settings/kernel/drivers/virtual_memory, which will look something like this:

vm on
swap_size 357564416

Open this file in an editor and change the size of the swap file manually. When you reboot, you’ll have a swap file smaller than the one the preferences panel will let you create.
Be careful — setting your swap file too small can affect system performance, especially when dealing with very large files.
Note: Do not return to the VM panel after rebooting to see the new size of your swap file. Accessing this panel again will cause it to snap back to the defaults. To check on the size of your new swap file, use the Terminal:

ls -l /var/swap

If you purchase one of those gargantuan new IDE drives but have an older BIOS, you may find that the BIOS does not see the drive. But BeOS only needs BIOS support for boot drives, not storage drives. You can still initialize and use BFS volumes on drives not seen by the BIOS just fine… or so it seems.
In truth, using a drive not seen by the BIOS means that no DMA level is sent back to the OS, so you won’t get full performance out of the drive — no DMA support at all. Worse, if you decide to get fancy one day and try to force DMA on by editing ~/config/settings/kernel/drivers/ata, you may very well hose your BFS partition, and be forced to re-initialize it and start over (I speak from experience).
If you can’t get your BIOS to recognize the drive, upgrade your motherboard’s BIOS and make sure the drive is detectable in the BIOS setup. You’ll get better performance and won’t risk data loss if you decide to make low-level changes via the ATA settings file (editing this file should never be taken lightly — make sure you know what you’re doing!)
Not having BIOS support for a drive is risky in any operating system, and BeOS is no exception. Be smart.

If you use RipEnc to encode, ID3 tag, and database your MP3 files, you’ll find that the vast majority of CDs are looked up properly by cdda-fs / cddblinkd, so you never have to name tracks by hand.
If you do encounter a CD that isn’t found in a compact disc database, RipEnc provides a hand-naming mode (Note: hand-naming mode was removed from RipEnc because this method works much better and that mode was therefore superfluous). However, a much better solution is to edit the actual volume and track names on the CD itself (look in the WAV subdirectory of the mounted CD for the tracks used by RipEnc).
While CDs aren’t writeable, cdda-fs does some clever tricks behind the scenes so you can edit CD filenames in the Tracker just like files on your hard disk. Best of all, it remembers your edits, so they’ll still be there next time you insert the CD. Once you’ve renamed the volume and track names, you can keep RipEnc set to Automatic mode and everything will come out right. And you’ll never have to give the tracks names again in the future.
When you rename the audio CD volume name, be sure to render it exactly like this:

Artist Name - Album Name

(with a single hypen separated by a single space on either side).

If you use RipEnc to encode, ID3 tag, and database your MP3 files, you may find that the list of possible genres it gives you don’t match the genres in your music collection. The genres presented are built into a command-line utility called id3ren, and represent the list of genres accepted by ID3.org, in addition to some new genres added by the WinAmp folks.
If you need genres not on that list, download the id3ren source code , open the file genre.h, and edit as needed. Recompile by typing

 make mv id3ren ~/config/bin 

Keep the source handy in case your replacement id3ren binary ever gets overwritten.

If you use slrn as a newsreader and want to be able to have URLs embedded in articles opened in NetPositive automatically, save the script below to ~/config/bin/OpenURL. Then open your .slrnrc file, search for the section „% WWW browser to use“ and add these two lines:

set non_Xbrowser "OpenURL --url -w 2 '%s' &"
set Xbrowser "OpenURL --url -w 2 '%s' &"

Change the „2“s to the number of the workspace you want NetPositive to be launched in. Quit and restart slrn if necessary. Now find an article containing a URL, and press „U“ (uppercase, not lowercase). If the article contains just one URL, it will appear in the status bar. Press Enter to launch it. If the article contains more than one URL, they’ll appear in a menu — use the arrow keys to choose a URL from the list.
Here’s the OpenURL script. Be sure to tweak the last section of the script to tell it whether to use Pe or Eddie as your main editor.

URL=0
while [ $# -ge 1 ]
do
        case $1 in
                -w | --workspace)
                        WORKSPACE=$2
                        shift
                        ;;
                -f | --file)
                        URL=0
                        ;;
                -u | --url)
                        URL=1
                        ;;
                -*)
                        ;;
                *)
                        STRING="$STRING $1"
                        ;;
        esac
        shift
done
if [ $WORKSPACE ]
then
        let WS=${WORKSPACE}-1
        Workspaces $WS
fi
if [ "$URL" -eq 1 ]
then
        NetPositive $STRING
fi